Abstract:

TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talks have become increasingly popular over the years and are now being used by educators worldwide to support and accompany lessons on a vast array of topics. Combining the power of selected TED talks on science with CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodology seemed an excellent opportunity to build on the potentiality of both.

During the 2016-2017 academic year, under and post-graduate students attending a Scientific English course at the University of Urbino, Italy, were invited to participate in an anonymous survey to evaluate the effectiveness and potential of this combination in promoting learning and foreign language acquisition in the sciences. TED presentations are done by top experts in their fields; the scientific topics treated are innovative and often subject to controversy. The topicality and pertinence of the subjects introduced in these talks sparked the desire in these students to reach beyond their language competences to fully comprehend content. In doing so, participants not only discovered new areas of research and learned about them, but improved their general language skills while building sector-specific vocabulary in their fields of study. The great majority of participants reported that TED-based CLIL lessons and related activities were more stimulating and productive in learning and understanding scientific English than more traditional methods. The pairing of TED and CLIL lends itself particularly well to developing sector-specific language competences in the sciences while acquiring new concepts and content. Further implementation would surely benefit students wishing to improve their language skills in this field.

Keywords:

CLIL, Ted, Scientific English, Higher Education.